


A Mother Alone

by Dyce



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 20:04:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/996004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dyce/pseuds/Dyce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ozai told Ursa he would let her go if she committed murder for him - but he lied. Years later, Ursa is still determined to escape and find her children again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mother Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Written because 'The Search' made Ozai out to be an idiot and Ursa to be a bad mother. And it sucked.

Ursa has never given up.

She is not entirely sure how long she has been in her cell. After she kissed her children goodbye and crept away - a mercy she is still grateful for - Ozai put her on a boat. She remembers little after that and assumes she was drugged. When she came back to herself, she was in her cell. There is one window, high on one wall, so heavily barred that she cannot push more than her hand through. There is no door to this cell - where a door once was, bricks and mortar fill the space, with a single narrow opening for trays of food and ingredients to pass through.

She has a few books, given to her by a sympathetic guard who vanished long ago when he was caught talking to her through the slit. She has pictures of her children, slipped through the slit when she refused to make any more poison unless Ozai gave her some proof that they were alive. She treasures them, though Azula's eyes have grown harder and Zuko's later portraits are expressionless and look more like his father every time.

She has never given up, because that would be to fail them. Somehow, someday, she will escape and find her children again.

She has spent years working on the mortar on the bricks on the inside of her wall. There are only a few minutes in each day when there is no guard on the other side to hear her scratching, and those times change, but she listens constantly and is always ready with the sharpened tools she convinced them she needed. The mortar is chipped away deeply now.

She has more than enough poison, carefully siphoned off from the batches made for Ozai a few drops at a time, for all her guards. She will get away. She will.

Then one day she wakes, and there is no guard. No food arrives. When she calls, no-one comes.

Ozai has decided he needs her no longer, she realizes. She has been left to starve.

But she has been storing food for a long time, against the day of her escape. Saving a little from each meal, she has slowly amassed a collection of pieces of fruit, nuts and salted fish that keeps well, eating it as it grows old and replacing it with fresh food from the trays. So she will not starve for a while.

For two days she works feverishly, chipping away at the mortar until she cannot reach any deeper into the gaps. Then she uses her tools to pry apart the table she uses for crafting her poisons. With ropes made from her twisted blankets and the frame of the table, tying the table's legs together into a tight bundle, she rigs a small, weak battering ram and begins to pound at the center of the weakened place.

By the evening of the third day, she is crawling out of the small hole she has made in the wall. It does not need to be large - she has always been slender, and long imprisonment has left her thin and frail.

She finds that she is in a small building. One room that served as her cell, a single hallway with a few doors leading off it... she finds a room with three beds, a small kitchen and an even smaller bathing room. She never knew she had only three guards - they almost never spoke to her. Outside, there is a small vegetable garden in front of the house - from the outside, it's just an ordinary stone house. There are a few trees behind it, and an empty roost that seems to have housed pigchickens.

And that's all. The island is tiny, a mere speck, and she sits down on the beach and cries when she realizes how completely pointless her dreams of escape have always been. The boat that must once have been there is gone with her guards. She cannot see any other land. Even if she could, she is far too weak to swim.

She has only one hope. She must wait until she sees a boat, then burn anything she can find to raise a signal. Smoke means a ship in trouble, she knows that much of how the Fire Nation's iron ships work. Another ship will always investigate.

That means soldiers, she knows that. And she knows what will come then. But they may keep her alive long enough to reach port, if they don't know who she is, and then she can escape.

She hoards her food, eking it out with vegetables from the garden. But she doesn't know how to keep the vegetables alive, or how to get fish out of the ocean, and her supplies dwindle quickly.

The little she has is almost gone when she sees an angular shape on the horizon. She has spark-rocks, at least, and with trembling hands she lights the signal fire she built out of the pig-chicken hutch and most of the furniture. It takes her a few attempts to light it, but she succeeds, and runs to the trees, stripping off all the small branches she can reach and throwing them on top of the seasoned wood. The green leaves make a cloud of foul-smelling smoke. Surely they will see it. Surely.

They do. The ship turns towards her little island, and she waits. The ship is close enough for her to see small figures moving around on it, tiny as ants, when her nerve breaks and she runs back into the house to hide. She is so afraid that her lips are cold and her heart is hammering in her chest, she hides in the room that was once a cell and whimpers, covering her head with her arms like a child. She thought she could endure anything for her children, but panic overwhelms her now.

She hears oddly accented voices in the house, and when one says 'there's nobody here' she hopes the others listen.

"Of course there's someone here. That fire didn't light itself." The voice is deep and calm, but the calm frays when she hears footsteps approaching. "Look at this. This door was bricked over - I think someone was kept prisoner here!"

Ursa covers her mouth with her hands, trying not to make a sound, but even so she sees hands come through the hole she made, tugging on the loosened bricks to widen it. She cannot watch, the fear consumes her, and she curls in a ball, covering her head with her sleeves, trying to vanish into the stone wall.

She hears bricks falling, and a soft grunt of effort. "There's someone in there," someone says, and minutes later someone touches her. She flinches away, whimpering, and to her surprise the hand is withdrawn. "Don't be scared," the deep voice says gently. "Nobody's going to hurt you. I promise, whatever happened to you is over now." She feels a fleeting, ephemeral tug on one of her sleeves. "Red... are you from the Fire Nation? Or just their prisoner?"

The tug on her sleeve shifts it, just a little. She can see through the gap now, and as she closes her eyes she sees something so strange that she opens them again.

Blue.

The knee she sees is wearing blue trousers.

Ursa has never seen blue clothing before.

When she lowers her arms, peeping over them, she sees a man crouching beside her. His brown, coarse hair is tied back in a simple tail, with beaded braids hanging down one side of his harsh-featured face. His eyes are startlingly blue against his dark skin, and he is wearing cool shades of blue and white.

"Who... who are you?" she falters, because surely this man is Water Tribe, and yet how could a Water Tribe warrior be here?

He smiles, and it softens his harsh face surprisingly. "My name is Hakoda," he says, still gentle. "I'm from the Southern Water Tribe. What's your name?"

She shivers, but it has been so long since anyone spoke kindly to her that she answers before she thinks better of it. "M-my name is Ursa."

He pauses, frowning, tilting his head and looking down at her. "Ursa... I know that name." Suddenly his eyes widen, and she flinches. "Are you the Ursa who was married to Ozai? The former Fire Lord?"

She is quaking with fear, but his last words drown out fear in shock. "The... the _former_ Fire Lord?" She actually clutches his arm, quaking in fear. "What happened? My children... are my children all right? Please tell me!"

He lays his hand gently over hers. "If you mean Zuko and Azula... they're alive, though they've been through a lot. Zuko is Fire Lord now... good kid," he adds, smiling. "He and my son broke me out of the Boiling Rock after Ozai caught me. I guess I get to return the favour now." He offers her his hand. "Come on. I'll take you home."

She goes with him, too stunned and bewildered to do anything else, though she remembers to bring her treasured pictures. The familiar ship is surrounded now by low wooden craft with blue sails, and there are men in blue everywhere. They look at her curiously, but not angrily.

Hakoda is kind, speaking gently to her of her children. He gives her food and clean clothes to replace her worn-out, half-rotted robes. They're men's clothes, but they are clean and warm and she doesn't care. He tells her she will see her son in only a day or two, and gives her a room of her own with a door she can lock or leave open as she chooses.

When she has rested and eaten, he gives her more details. He tries to be kind as he tells her that Zuko, while well and happy now, was sent into exile by his father at thirteen with a terrible scar on his face. The portraits and threats were lies. And Azula, her poor little girl, was so warped by her father that in the wake of defeat her reason has deserted her. She is safe, Hakoda assures Azula's frantic mother. Zuko is taking care of her, has asked Hakoda's daughter Katara and the Avatar (the Avatar has reappeared, and is only a child, and the war is over... it's all too much to take in at first) to try to heal her mind. Hakoda is sure that having her mother back will help, too.

After all her waiting, it takes only two days to reach the capital again.

Hakoda sent word ahead, it seems. When the ship docks, the gangway is hardly lowered when a young man in heavy state robe rushes up it, followed by a girl in blue and one in red and black. Ursa barely notices them - she has eyes only for her son.

Zuko looks so like his father that it disturbs her, but the terrible scar decreases the likeness. His hair is short, awkwardly pulled back, and his good eye is wide and full of tears. "Mother?" he says softly, and all she can do is nod, her own tears pouring down her face.

He crosses the deck to her in a rush, and she expects to be snatched roughly into his arms - but instead he holds her as carefully and gently as if she were crafted of spun glass. "Oh, Mother," he whispers, his voice breaking. "I thought you were dead. I thought..."

She sobs into his shoulder, and he holds her as tenderly as if he were the parent and she the child.

The girls, Mai and Katara, take her in charge when Zuko is finally able to let her go without both of them sobbing. They take her to rooms in the palace and Katara the healer tends to her bruised, weakened body while Mai - little Mai, a young woman now - brushes out Ursa's grey and black hair with gentle hands. Mai assures her that Azula, though irrational, is being kindly treated and cared for. Katara introduces her to a small, solemn-eyed boy who is the Avatar, and who smiles brightly at her and tells her he's glad she's all right.

She isn't all right. After so long imprisoned, she isn't sure she ever will be. But seeing her gentle son on the throne dealing justice instead of cruelty, making plans for peace instead of war... holding her daughter in her arms while Azula cries hysterically, alternately clinging to her and trying to push her away... this is enough. She has her children again, and Zuko knows and Azula begins to believe that she did not abandon them by choice, that she loves them more than there are words to say.

She is there to comfort Zuko when Mai ends their relationship. She is there to hold a slender hand when Azula leaves the hospital for the first time, her eyes clear again at last. She is there when Zuko marries his sweet waterbender, and when Azula tumbles awkwardly into love with a gentle poet twice her age who is as kind and loving as any mother could wish.

When Zuko proudly lays his first child in her arms, she smiles down into soft blue eyes and knows that she was wrong.

She is all right now. Everything is all right now.


End file.
